by His Holiness Brahmānanda Svāmī

His Holiness Brahmananda Svami, after acting for many years as President of ISKCON's first New York City temple (and simultaneously working as a teacher in the New York City public school system), became director of ISKCON Press and in 1970 accepted the renounced order of life. He was the first to introduce the Krsna consciousness movement in Africa and is now on a preaching tour of Kenya and other East African countries.

SRIMAD-BHAGAVATAM may rightly be esteemed above all the many other Vedic literatures, for its English edition stands as the foremost work of the world's leading Vedic scholar and authority, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Svami Prabhupada. Although His Divine Grace has undertaken many translations of Vedic literatures, including Sri Isopanisad, Caitanya-caritamrta and a thousand-page definitive edition of Bhagavad-gita As It Is, and has written handfuls of small volumes on yoga, death, space travel and other subjects, it is his Srimad-Bhagavatam that he considers his life's mission. To date he has published six volumes, comprising the first and second of the Bhagavatam's twelve cantos, as well as a two-volume summary study of the exceptional Tenth Canto.

Astoundingly, His Divine Grace promises to present the complete, authoritative 18,000-verse Sanskrit work in no less than sixty volumes. It is also significant that for his historic voyage to America from India in 1965, Srila Prabhupada equipped himself with a hastily printed edition of his First Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam rather than the Srimad-Bhagavad-gita, which is far more widely known in the West. Now, after almost seven years of preaching, having toured the world four times and opened more than ninety centers in sixteen different countries (at the age of seventy-six!), he has announced his retirement to fulfill his pledge to complete, for the benefit of the world, his elaborate English presentation of Srimad-Bhagavatam, "The Beautiful Story of the Personality of Godhead."

Srimad-Bhagavatam's original author is Srila Krsna-dvaipayana Vyasa, the author of the entire galaxy of Vedic literature. Understanding that Srila Vyasadeva is actually Krsna Himself appearing as a literary incarnation enables one to comprehend how he was able to edit the original Veda in four divisions, from which emanates all knowledge of all subjects that exist now in the world and will exist in the future; then to write the massive Mahabharata (60,000 verses), which includes the famous Bhagavad-gita; then the eighteen Puranas; and then the highly intricate Vedanta-sutra. Such a vast scriptural literature could issue forth only from the Lord Himself.